Review: LG Muziq

The exterior screen of the Muziq is an average size. Loading a real picture as the background wallpaper lets you see that it has decent resolution and good color representation. It was mostly viewable outdoors, though direct sunlight challenged it a little bit. The icons were readable, but could have been sharper. Same goes for the interior screen. Colors all perform well, and it was readable outdoors, but there was digital artifacting and the icons could have been sharper.

Signal

If there's one thing the Muziq did exceptionally well in most places, it was to hold onto a signal. The only place it had less than 5 full bars of coverage was in my basement, where it dropped to no coverage or one bar. Driving through the Lincoln Tunnel, the Muziq maintained 5 bars and a data call with no problems. When compared side-by-side with another Sprint phone that had only one bar, the Muziq had 5. It also survived the NJ vault test.

Sound

Call quality of the Muziq was good. The earpiece was acceptably loud for most environments. Conversations were easily heard in a loud coffee shop. Not so much so in a bar with music playing, but we were able to make out enough of the conversation that we weren't forced outside. There was some hiss and crackling on occasion, but most conversations were free of noise. When used for listening to music, the external speaker sounded slightly muffled, as if a tiny sock had been stuffed into the speaker cavity. But it wasn't thin or tinny. For speakerphone calls, it was amply loud. The quality of music streamed via Bluetooth to stereo headphones gave us no reason to complain, but it didn't excite our audiophile genes, either.

Battery

The Muziq performed well in battery tests. No matter how much or how little we used it, it seemed to always need more juice every 4 days. Even heavy Web browsing, texting, music downloading and video streaming didn't effect battery life overly much, sapping perhaps one day from the time between charges. Bluetooth, however, drained battery life noticeably, and could kill it in two days.